Booked flights to spend 4 days with my best friend in Melbourne Australia and to see if I might be interested in moving there. I cant really afford it but I hate only being able to see her one or two times a year when she comes over to visit her parents and once the dairy season starts in at the end of August none of the technicians at my company are allowed leave til February so this is my last chance for quite some time.
I'm really hoping to have a good trip since I haven't visited Australia since I was 15 and that time I stayed at Kings Cross in Sydney and though it was great experience really showed me some of the worst side of humanity. I saw rampant racism and sexism and met a beautiful 15 year old girl who looked almost 30 who was being forced to take drugs and work as a stripper and prostitute. I saw a man robbed at gun point in an alley and a Japanese man pushed into traffic and told his kind didn't belong on the same foot path as white men. It was quite shocking to see everyone going about their lives as if all this was normal and acceptable behavior.
My mother who was with me at the time didn't tell me but implied that this is where she worked as a dancer when she left her first abusive husband. It was hard to picture the strong women I knew ever living the same kind of life as some of the sad and beaten girls I saw at the time. I've never really wanted to go back to Sydney after that trip not so much because of the things I saw but because of how miserable it made me feel that I wasn't brave enough to try changing them.
I'm really hoping to have a good trip since I haven't visited Australia since I was 15 and that time I stayed at Kings Cross in Sydney and though it was great experience really showed me some of the worst side of humanity. I saw rampant racism and sexism and met a beautiful 15 year old girl who looked almost 30 who was being forced to take drugs and work as a stripper and prostitute. I saw a man robbed at gun point in an alley and a Japanese man pushed into traffic and told his kind didn't belong on the same foot path as white men. It was quite shocking to see everyone going about their lives as if all this was normal and acceptable behavior.
My mother who was with me at the time didn't tell me but implied that this is where she worked as a dancer when she left her first abusive husband. It was hard to picture the strong women I knew ever living the same kind of life as some of the sad and beaten girls I saw at the time. I've never really wanted to go back to Sydney after that trip not so much because of the things I saw but because of how miserable it made me feel that I wasn't brave enough to try changing them.